Shell-shocked and searching

Anita Shreve’s latest character-driven novel is both a historical glimpse into the side effects of war and a mystery centered on a young woman’s search for her lost identity.Stella Bain opens as a young nurse’s aide regains consciousness in a hospital camp on a French battlefield in the winter of 1916. She’s been hit by shrapnel in her legs and can’t remember any...

Authentic domestic drama

Webster first saw her “wrapped around a tree,” the victim of an automobile accident he was called to help with as a new recruit for the local emergency rescue service. At once, Sheila’s “glossy brown hair” cancels out her “blood-alcohol point two-four,” and Webster finds himself hopelessly in love with her.Beautiful, defensive and addicted to alcohol,...

Grief and awakening on Mt. Kenya

There comes a point in Anita Shreve’s latest novel, A Change in Altitude, when we start to wonder when the plagues are coming—the succession of unfortunate events that befall the protagonist are that bad. It would ruin the plot to describe exactly what she must withstand, but suffice it to say that there is death, looting, political corruption and strands of adultery. (Not to...

Facing the past to embrace the future

Past tense is as important as present tense in Anita Shreve's delicate story of growing emotional and physical maturity, glimpsed and gained through two painful years of memories and hope. As Light on Snow opens, 12-year-old Nicky Dillon (telling the story 22 years later) doesn't realize the unreality of the life she and her father are living after the traumatic loss of her mother and baby...

Messages in a bottle from Anita Shreve

Honora Beecher collects sea glass off the coast of New Hampshire. Fragments of clear, blue and green bottles boat trash, she thinks to herself find their way to the sandy beach where Honora is making a life with her new husband Sexton Beecher. It's the late 1920s, and they are buying into the American dream as deeply as they know how. He is a typewriter salesman. She works full-time to make...

A tale of lifelong passion

Prepare to lose sleep, skip meals and ignore your e-mail. Anita Shreve's new novel, The Last Time They Met, will keep you turning its pages into the unwholesome hours of the night, even though you know you should put it down and hit the pillow. Shreve's reckless and heroic central character, Thomas Janes, has been in love with Linda Fallon all his life. Though they parted in the wake of...

Anita Shreve: Telling the timeless tale

With her new novel Fortune's Rocks, Anita Shreve, author of the bestseller The Pilot's Wife, returns to the time she loves, the 19th century. Though she believes that, at their core, people's lives have not changed in a hundred years, the way we talk about our lives has. She likens modern speech to a corset, finding it "spare, tighter,...

The Pilot's Wife review

Reading Anita Shreve's novel The Pilot's Wife is like unraveling a thread. From the moment Kathryn Lyons answers the late-night knock at her door, she and the reader are set upon a course that eventually reveals that the life Kathryn thought was one way was really another. Kathryn is married to Jack, a pilot on the Boston-London run. They have a 15-year old daughter, Mattie,...